27.5.06

This is a passage from Olmert's adress to the US congress on May 24th. To this, Olmert added that this conviction alone cannot preserve Israel as a 'secure democratic jewish state'.

On the basis of this assertion, Kathleen Christison raises the moral question of Zionism, not often discussed when adressing the Israeli/Palestinian issue.

Zionism as a moral issueChristison writes:''Olmert's assertion of this all-encompassing Jewish "right" is certainly not a new feature of Israeli and Zionist dogma. The notion has underlain Zionism from the beginning, hidden sometimes behind a leftist veneer of accommodation to the reality of the Palestinian presence in this sacred Jewish land, but never very far beneath the surface. The Zionist belief in Jewish supremacy has never truly been hidden. I ran into this in crude form a few years ago. Shortly after the Palestinian intifada began in 2000, an acquaintance -- no friend, but an irritating bigot who always argues Israel's case openly on the basis that Jewish interests are superior to Palestinian interests -- wrote me an email in which he concluded that, because there is "simply not enough room in Palestine for both Jews and Palestinians," the Palestinians should "go back to Jordan, where they came from" and leave Palestine to the Jews, who own it and so badly need a homeland. (The erroneous notion that Palestinians came from Jordan is a conscience-clearing artifact of the Zionist imagination, designed to "prove" that Palestinians did not originally come from Palestine, are simply interlopers in a Jewish land, and therefore will not be hurt or inconvenienced by "going back" where they came from.) I told him he was factually wrong and completely immoral -- which I'm sure did nothing to burden his conscience, but which did serve, blessedly, to end our correspondence.''''The particular argument put forth by this particular man expresses more crude racism than most supporters of Israel would admit to feeling...At bottom, this is a policy based on the assumption that there is "simply no room in Palestine for both Jews and Palestinians" and that the only possible solution over the long term is for the Palestinians to disappear in some fashion. As the PLO ambassador to the U.S., Afif Safieh, is fond of saying, Israel wants the Palestinians' geography but not their demography -- the land but not the people.''Options for the disappearance of Palestinians:''This Palestinian disappearance can be accomplished in one of several ways, by Israeli calculation. First, they could be induced to leave Palestine altogether; Israel has been working since its creation on some version of this option -- outright expulsion, as occurred in 1948, or inducing a "voluntary" exit by making life insupportable, as is occurring today -- as the best way to relieve itself of the Palestinian "problem." Or, as a second option, the Palestinians could be forced into submission; this has been the fate of the 20 percent of Israel's population that is Palestinian, and it was the fate of West Bank-Gaza Palestinians during the first 20 years of the occupation when they were quiescent under Israeli control. This option is no longer feasible from Israel's standpoint, however, since there are now or soon will be more Palestinians than Jews in Palestine, which makes the job of forcing submission too unseemly for a state claiming to be democratic. Or, as a third option, the Palestinians could be lulled into a political submissiveness that leads them, out of desperation, to accede to every Israeli condition; this is what Yasir Arafat did by signing on to the Oslo agreement and recognizing Israel's "right" to exist, thus giving away all the Palestinians' negotiating cards without securing in return any Israeli agreement to do more than conduct negotiations.''